Fix 404 Pages

The Fix 404 pages option is different than designating a 404 error page for your site. This feature lets you know what people have tried to navigate to directly but received an error page. Either a search engine has an older link still in its index that people are clicking on or a visitor has a bookmark that is out of date. In both cases, you want to make their experience of being taken to the correct location as quick and seamless as possible.

Location of the Fix 404 Page options

Understanding the 404 Broken Page List

The 404 list is headed by a four column table, the first three of which are sortable.

Path - the internal path attempted by a visitor or bot. By definition, to appear on this list, the attempted path does not exist on your site. This column is sortable—click on the column title to activate the sort feature.

Count - the number of times a visitor or bot attempted to access content at this path. Use discretion in deciding if you need to resolve this; a bot can endlessly try to access your site at a URL path that doesn't and never will exist on your site, like /wp-login. You can safely ignore these types of 404s. This column is sortable—click on the column title to activate the sort feature.

Last Accessed - the most recent date a visitor or bot attempted this path. This column is sortable—click on the column title to activate the sort feature.

Operations - a site manager's options for resolving the path, which includes:

Add redirect

Ignore

Determine the veracity of a broken link

As mentioned in the column title descriptions above, you're just as likely to see links attempted by a bot as you are a link by a well-intentioned user or someone attempting a link from your previous site, especially if you were an early SiteFarm adopter using our initial version of the migration script.

Links you should Redirect are:

links that you recognize as having likely existed in a previous version of your site

links that look close to a page you know exists on your site, but show up frequently in your 404 list because of a spelling mistake or visitors are guessing the likely URL

Links you can safely Ignore:

a path that includes weird code that looks for content that you know doesn't exist on your site. Examples: